## Metadata - Author: [[Neal Stephenson]] - Full Title: Seveneves - Category: #books ## Highlights - “The Cloud Ark Constitution is now in effect.” Dinah drew breath, knowing what this meant. Markus spelled it out anyway. “This means that all nation-states of Earth, and their governments and constitutions, no longer exist. Their military and civilian chains of command are no more. Oaths you may have taken to them, allegiances you may have held, loyalties you may have felt, citizenships you may have had are now and forever dissolved. The rights granted you by the Cloud Ark Constitution, no more and no less, are your rights. The laws and responsibilities of the Cloud Ark Constitution now bind you. You are citizens of a new nation now, the only nation. Long may it endure.” ([Location 5534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00LZWV8JO&location=5534)) - She tried then to mourn for all the others who had died, but it was too big. Emotionally, it was little different from reading about a great war that had happened a hundred years ago. Which maybe was Markus’s whole point. Even though the dying was still going on, they had to force themselves to think about it like the Irish potato famine, or like what had happened to the peoples of the New World when Columbus had arrived and infected them with a slew of deadly diseases. Regret, even horror were appropriate. But detachment was necessary. They all had 704 seconds in which to effect that detachment. So Dinah thought about what exactly would be entailed in doing Rufus MacQuarie proud. There was a simple answer, which had to do with doing the right thing, being honorable, upholding a few rough-and-ready ethical standards. A sort of frontier code of conduct. All of which was easy to understand if not always quite so easy to live up to. But Rufus was not a cowboy, and he certainly wasn’t a preacher. He was a miner: a delver, a demolisher, a builder, a businessman. If he lived by a simple code of ethics, it was not an end in itself, but a way to get something done without selling his soul or destroying his reputation. It was a tool to be wielded like a shovel or a stick of dynamite. Tools were for building things; and pride was something you could feel after the fact, when you stood back, looked at what you had built, and passed it on to your children. Dinah could spend the rest of her life living by her word, giving everyone a fair shake, and all of that. Rufus would no doubt approve of all those things. But it was not the charge he had given her. He had told her, though not in so many words, to get busy building a future. ([Location 5578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00LZWV8JO&location=5578)) - A large population cannot live in arklets eating algae. We need to establish a viable and safe colony first. Then, we build your lab. Then, we create a more diverse ecosystem: better food, greater stability. Only then do we even begin to worry about the heterozygosity of the human population. Until that time, we have more than enough people to create healthy non-inbred children just by the usual process of fucking each other.” ([Location 6097](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00LZWV8JO&location=6097))